Grecian Formulas.('All Day Permanent Red: The First Battle Scenes of Homer's Iliad Rewritten')('The Songs of the Kings')('Sappho's Leap')('The Parthenon')(Book Review)

All Day Permanent Red: The First Battle Scenes of Homer's Iliad Rewritten, by Christopher Logue (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $18). The mounting pressure of a city siege, two politician-generals invoking gods, the amount of dust in the Middle East--this version of the first skirmishes in the Iliad has the immediacy of an embed's dispatches. Logue, a veteran of the Second World War, has been freely translating Homer since 1959. His verse displays a gift for the unexpected simile--the sound of the Greek army getting to its feet is like "a raked sky-wide Venetian blind."The music in the latest installment is wild and improvisational: "That unpremeditated joy as you / --the Uzi shuddering warm against your hip / Happy in danger in a dangerous place / Yourself another self you found at Troy-- / Squeeze nickel through that rush of Greekoid scum!"But the final note is hushed, when, after the battle, we see the ridge overlooking the Trojan plain: "save for a million footprints, / Empty now."

The Songs of the Kings, by Barry Unsworth (Nan A. Talese / Doubleday; $26). A stubborn wind from the northeast ushers in rough times for the House of Atreus, and the Greek ships, en route to Troy, remain trapped in the straits at Aulis. Unsworth's retelling of the story, familiar from Euripides, of the sacrifice of Iphigeneia to appease the gods so that the boats can sail is a bold, modern tale with cynical riffs on the themes of duty and power, truth and fiction. His Greek warriors are schemers and media-savvy self-promoters who are desperate to look good in the sung reports that are their equivalent of the news media--songs that are, we realize, the seeds of the Homeric tradition. As Odysseus says, "Once things get into the Song you will never entirely succeed in getting them out again."

Sappho's Leap, by ...